Monthly Archives: February 2009

Was tootling around on the internet tonight, and came across this. Let’s Dish is available for preorder at Fictionwise! Mind you, they have it under erotica, which it’s not, but hey – still pretty cool. I’ve never bought a book from Fictionwise, preferring My Bookstore and More, so I can’t tell you anything about thier customer service, etc., but it’s there!

I’m on my honeymoon. Not with my husband, of course. We did that nearly sixteen years ago, and trust me – the honeymoon is decidedly over.

But I am honeymooning with a new book. That wonderful stage when hopes are so high, everything is new, and nothing’s gone wrong yet. The story and I haven’t had our first fight. We will, just not yet. This is the period where I get to know my characters, warts and all, and get to spend some time with them wandering in my head.

In Let’s Dish and Another Time Around, my heroines start out being pushed around by others. Maggie’s mother tells her what to do, Brin’s mother-in-law and assistant are in charge of her every move. Alex is a little different. She’s not a lost lamb. Oh, she’s stuck in neutral, all right. So dedicated to the family business that she’s sacrificed everything. So needing a sense of normalcy that she denies her talents. But Alex knows who she is and has made a conscious decision to sacrifice herself for her family.

And then comes along Jeff.

What’s a girl to do when she’s falling in love for the first time, and with a guy who could destroy everything she’s worked so hard to maintain? Then there’s the dead guy, who insists on talking to her. Until she really needs him to. So what will happen? How does it end?

I don’t know yet. One disadvantage of being a “pantser” is that you’re never quite sure how things turn out. Will the girl get the guy, or will they even survive? Will Alex’s mother spill her secrets, and discover a few more on the way? Will Alex’s sister have a daughter, or is the Blotz tradition of baby girls doomed to end?

Friday night I indulged in a little writer chat with a group here in town. Great ladies, and we had one heckuva time. As we discussed writing comercially, the topic drifted to writing erotica. None of us have ever tried it – or I should say, tried it sucessfully. We won’t discuss the scene I wrote on a dare that involves an anatomically correct android and a Vulcan/Romulan halfbreed.

So for our writing prompt that night, one of the ladies tried to write an erotic scene. Problem was, none of us could keep a straight face. Now that had nothing to do with the subject matter and everything to do with us all being rather punchy, tired, and out of the house without various children tagging along. The scene turned out to be wonderful, but also funny as hell.

So did we invent a new subgenre? Erotic-comedy? Comedic-erotica? No, those titles are too long. Eromedie? Yikes – sounds like a particularly nasty surgical procedure. Cerotica? Said right, that sounds like a new martial art. Or maybe a marital art?

Yeah, puns and I don’t get along.

So that left us with Comerotica. But that sounds like a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby “On the Road” movie, only with naughty undertones.

So what do you think? Do you enjoy reading erotica, funny or not? Or is funny erotica a turn off? And what the heck would you call it anyway?

Another Time Around is due next week. The blog is the first thing to suffer when I’m on a deadline, so I apologize for the lack of actual content as of late. I’m almost done, so hopefully I get better about posting here.

The second thing to go to hell is my hair. My roots are in desperate need of some Loving Care, if you know what I mean. My husband thinks I fuss about my grays too much. View must be pretty good from the cheap seats, I say, since I have much more gray than he does. Now that might not seem too unfair, but…well, there’s a tiny age difference between us. Tiny being 20 years. Go ahead, let your jaw drop. We’re used to it.

So at any rate, this guy is 20 years older than me and he has fewer grays. Can I call a penalty on that? No fair. What makes it even worse is that my parents went gray late. Yet my brother, my sister, and me? Yeah. Gray in our 30s. Not. Fair.

But I digress.

So here I am with gray hair, not blogging, and not doing housework. Oh yeah, that’s another thing that goes by the wayside when I’m on a deadline. My house is filthy. My clothes are wrinkly. Deadline. It’s a convenient excuse, true, but…well, true!

But, as I said, I’m almost done. I needed to write a new scene, which I did. It’s awful, but it’s written. The main edits are done, which is a bonus, so I just have a very few loose ends to tie up. Then I’m done, and back to blogging again. And housework. And maybe dying my roots.

The Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is agitating against Scholastic again, claiming that through its school book clubs the company “has exploited its unique access to schools by marketing an array of non-book products in its monthly book club fliers…. The campaign said about one-third of the items for sale in Scholastic’s elementary and middle school book clubs were either not books or were books packaged with other items such as jewelry, toys and makeup.”

Campaign director Susan Linn says, “The opportunity to sell directly to children in schools is a privilege, not a right. But Scholastic is abusing that privilege by flooding classrooms across the country with ads for toys, trinkets, and electronic media with little or no educational value.”

Scholastic evp Judy Newman tells the AP “We’re losing kids’ nterest (in reading). We have to keep them engaged. This (book club) model is 60 years old, and it has to stay relevant to do the work it does. To the extent we put in a few carefully selected non-book items, it’s to keep up the interest.”

Newman tells the NYT, “We work with teachers to make sure that items are O.K. to put out in their classrooms. In a class of 24 kids, some of them will be turned on by a game, and it helps kids engage in the book club process.”

The Campaign is the same group that takes credit for getting Scholastic to stop selling products featuring the “sexy” Bratz dolls in their school book clubs and fairs. (Scholastic said it was pulling the products because of low sales.)

Last fall the campaign took credit for having persuaded Scholastic to discontinue selling picture books based on the overtly sexy Bratz dolls in any of its school book clubs or fairs this school year. At the time, Scholastic said its decision was influenced as much by dwindling sales as it was by the campaign’s push.